


all the tomorrows they don't have

by tielan



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, F/M, Fake Marriage, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-05
Updated: 2018-03-05
Packaged: 2019-03-26 10:19:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13855764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan
Summary: This was the part that made Maria wince internally. It was one thing to undertake such a mission with an agent who knew how the deal worked; it was quite another to be undertaking it with Steve Rogers.





	all the tomorrows they don't have

**Author's Note:**

> This work is posted as ABANDONED AND UNFINISHED. You have been warned.

“You’re going to need a partner for this.”

“I know.” Maria looked at the brief and sighed. She could palm it off to someone else, perhaps, but the truth was that there were increasingly few people available to do the work that once occupied thousands. “Who do we have?”

Akela slid the tablet over, and Maria skimmed the agents and winced. Not a good selection at all. She could knock 90% of the names off just by looking at what they were currently assigned to. But this was what she had to work with, and in an increasingly unstable world, it was taking less and less to tip everyone out of alignment.

They couldn’t afford further complications.

Her cellphone rang, and Akela’s brows shot up. “A bit obvious, don’t you think?”

“It’s Stark’s fault.”

“Isn’t it always?”

Maria snorted, then sobered and answered the call. “Are you secure?”

“Yes. ”

She blinked, surprised at the prompt certainty. Then she figured she could ask that question later. “What do you need?”

“A safehouse. Barton says he can hide Wanda, but Lang has his own contacts and will use them. Sam has people who will shelter him, although I’d feel better if you had an eye on him, too. He’s been seen with me a little too much for my liking.”

“And Barnes?”

“He’s staying here.”

He didn't detail where ‘here’ was, but Maria had a few suspicions. There weren't many places in the world where one could comfortably and safely hold the Winter Soldier, and the involvement of the young King-presumptive of Wakanda in getting hold of Bucky Barnes only confirmed something that she'd realised a couple of years ago while working with SI data. Nick had suspected Wakanda of hiding something for number of years before the fall of S.H.I.E.L.D. He just hadn't known what.

Maria still didn't know what. But she suspected it was rather bigger than anyone had anticipated.

But that was for another day. Maria glanced over at Akela, who had lifted both eyebrows, hoisted the tablet and was dancing it up and down.

 _No,_ she mouthed.

 _Yes,_ Akela nodded.

 _Hell to the no._ She was _not_ going to pretend-marriage with Steve Rogers of all the men in the world-

And her silence had gone on too long. Maria forced herself to think of the next thing. Secure. Safehouse. Getting Rogers out of 'here'. Oh, right. Transport.

“Are you able to leave...your present location."

"I don't think they'll stop me."

"Okay. Do you have a Quinjet - or equivalent craft?"

There was a momentary hesitation. “Yes.”

" _Ask him,_ " Akela hissed, _sotto voce_.

Unfortunately, it wasn't _sotto voce_ enough for a supersoldier's hearing.

"Should I have asked if you were secure?"

"I'm secure." Maria stared at Akela, who stared right back.

Maria ran through the reasons this was probably a bad idea, starting with _he was goddamn Steve Rogers._ Then she sighed. "I can get you a safehouse..."

"But?"

"But I might need a favour in return."

The hesitation on the other end of the line wasn’t encouraging. Then Steve sighed, “I don’t have the shield anymore.”

Maria looked at the brief for the mission. “You won’t need the shield, Rogers.”

* * *

“Janet and Victor Stein are just your average mad scientists living in American suburbia.” Akela pulled up the full report on the Steins and ‘tossed’ it over to Steve’s tablet. “Janet has an on-again, off-again contract with Hammer Technologies, while Victor worked for Oscorp for over a decade. They came up on S.H.I.E.L.D’s radar about six months before you brought everything down, Cap – their son was arrested for disturbing the peace and had a piece of significantly advanced technology on him.”

“How significantly advanced?” Steve looked from Akela to Maria. “What level are we talking about?”

Maria took over the narrative. “Stark’s ARC reactor tech level – basically energy harnessed to be used offensively. But the S.H.I.E.L.D agent with the tech that registered the energy levels also found an unusual genetic imprint for the kid. The DNA traces he managed to retrieve from police records showed a degrading biosignature, but no clear signs that any enhancements had taken place.”

Steve nodded, sharp understanding in his gaze. “What happened to the kid?”

“He ran away a few months later – right about the time that the Insight project began heating up.” Maria shrugged. “Then we upended the playing board, and everything we had on the Steins went out on the internet – or underground, if we got to it fast enough.”

“Okay.” He set the tablet down. “So what do you need me for?”

“The Steins have recently been employed by the Iacoid Group, which picked up the bulk of employees who formerly worked at AIM. While there’s no outwards sign that Iacoid has plans to pick up AIM’s research into tissue regeneration, we want a closer look at the Steins. And that’s where you and Maria come in.”

Steve looked over at her. “Mission objective?”

“To determine any ties the Steins might have with companies and groups who are joining the bio-enhancement race. Intel-gathering, mostly.”

“And we’re going to do this by...?”

“Observing. Gathering data. Inserting ourselves into their circle of acquaintances and leveraging that intimacy to find what we need to know.”

He wasn’t slow to pick up the pronouns, or the implications of it. “Inserting _ourselves_ into their circle of acquaintances?”

And this was the part that made Maria wince internally. It was one thing to undertake such a mission with an agent who knew how the deal worked; it was quite another to be undertaking it with Steve Rogers.

Akela, of course, just grinned, a mischievous light in her eyes. “You’re going undercover. As a married couple.”

* * *

To be fair to him, Steve didn’t reject the idea outright.

“You don’t have other agents...?”

“More capable of this kind of work? Yes, we do.” Maria had been through the list. “But pulling them from their current work would involve more risk than we’re able to take at this point.”

He nodded, lifting his gaze from his tablet. “The issue of my face being instantly recognisable isn’t going to hamper the matter of ‘undercover’?”

“You’ll have a disguise mesh for your face. So will Maria since she’s known in intelligence circles.” Thank God for Akela, who’d worked out the logistics of it all back when Maria had assigned her the mission objectives. “You’ll be temporarily moving into the neighbourhood – one of their neighbours put their house up on a house swap site, and we snaffled it up. They’re spending three months in Brisbane, Australia, you’re spending three months in Suburbia, USA.”

Maria restrained the twist of her lip, although obviously not enough for Steve to miss it.

“Regretting marrying me already?”

“Since it’s sending me to suburgatory,” she said drolly. “Yes.”

Akela pulled up the mission file and projected it onto the near wall. “So, here’s the neighbourhood – typical white American suburbia, here’s the Steins’ house. Here’s the place where you’ll be staying. You’re going to have to be newlyweds, because nobody’s going to believe that you guys have been having sex for more than a week.”

Maria pinched the bridge of her nose and thought – somewhat uncharitably given Akela’s imprisonment history – about deep, dark holes in the ground. Sure, Akela was characteristically blunt, and she’d always enjoyed tweaking Maria’s nose, but did she have to be quite so...ruthless?

“Rogers?”

Steve smiled. “I guess it gives us time to settle into the roles.”

“As long as you do better than you did with Romanoff.”

The smile vanished in a strangled noise. “With Romanoff? When—?”

“When you were on the run from Rumlow and co.?” Akela tilted her head. “You were pretending to be engaged and looking for somewhere to vacay. Romanoff did reasonably, given what she had to work with, but you’re just lucky that the employee had majored in Socially Awkward Geek – Advanced Level, because it was the most awful piece of acting I’ve ever seen – worse than Barton’s ‘sex tape’, and God knows _that_ was bad.”

Maria snorts. “It was _supposed_ to be bad. That was the entire _point_.”

“Clint made a sex tape?”

“I’ll tell you later,” Maria promised. There’d be plenty of time for such details. Undercover missions tended to be long, drawn out bouts of waiting between short, intense bursts of action. She had no doubt this would be like any other one.

Her cell buzzed with a message and she checked the incoming. “I’ve got a bead on a long-term safehouse for Sam – I have to answer this. In the meantime, read up on the mission and we’ll work out the details later.”

* * *

‘Later’ turned out to be near midnight, because Maria’s contact for the safehouse wasn’t certain of it’s provenance, and she needed to go check that out. Besides, she figured she wasn’t needed at this point – Steve would want time to settle his mind about the mission, get used to the idea, and once he had that worked out, then they could start working out the details.

So she was rather surprised to find the downstairs lights on and Steve sprawled comfortably on the couch with the baseball on, the tablet lying discarded beside him.

“Hey. You’re up late.”

“You’re out late.” He sat up and muted the TV, before dropping the remote on the coffee table and resting his elbows on his knees with a wry smile. “Should I ask where you’ve been and who you’ve been out with?”

Maria snorted and sat down on the edge of the couch. “Only if you intend on playing the jealous husband.”

“I guess since we’re newlyweds, I shouldn’t have had time to start doubting the late hours you work.” A twinkle gleamed in his eye. “Right, sweetheart?”

“You’re pushing it, _honey_.”

He grinned sideways at her. “I read the files and the notes, and Akela gave me the backgrounds of the people we’ll be. Roger and Hillary Grant?”

“We figured it would be best to keep it in the family, so to speak. You don’t have much undercover experience—”

“One fake engagement with Romanoff doesn’t qualify me?”

Maria rolled her eyes. “So we’re trying to keep it simple. You can call me Hill, I’ll call you Roger, and if we slip, it’s not too far off from reality that we can’t cover for it.”

His mouth pursed. “And we’re sharing a bed.”

“You realise that’s the least personal thing that we’re going to have to do? Because when we’re in bed, we’ll be asleep for 99% of the time; it’s all the rest of the time when we’re awake that we’re going to have to get used to each other.” She reached over and put her hand on his knee, then lifted an eyebrow when he tensed. “Like that. If you flinch every time I touch you, we’re not going to be a very convincing couple.”

Blue eyes narrowed, and Steve leaned over, hooking an arm around her waist and pulling her across the seat so she was right up against him. “Is this better?”

Apart from the startled bump that Maria’s heart gave as her body came in contact with warm, hard male? “Yes.” She made herself relax a fraction, then looked up into his face. “We have to be comfortable with each other, physically.”

“ _How_ physically?”

“I’m not proposing we have sex.” And if she sounded prim, that was because the alternative was to sound breathless. As nearly anyone would when faced with the prospect of sex with Steve Rogers. “But at the least you’ve got to be willing to touch me.”

“Mostly, I’m worried that you might punch me out for taking liberties.”

“I’m in character; I’m not going to punch out my husband for touching—” But she sucked in a harsh breath as his hand came down to rest on her knee. A firm grip, not a harsh one, but the heat of him shot through her system like a jolt of fire.

Maria looked up to find him smirking at her. “Excuse me, you were saying?”

“Smartass.”

“You seem surprised.” But his own breath hitched as she tucked her head in under his and brushed her hand down his chest to rest on the six-pack of his belly. Hard muscle quivered in a shaky breath before he let it out. “Okay, I guess that’s payback.”

“Just breathe,” she told him.

It was an instruction for both of them, and Maria let herself sink into the feel and warmth of him, the smell of his body and the rise and fall of his chest. The gentle rub of his hand at her waist, the way he reoriented his body just slightly towards her, the tilt of his cheek against the top of her head...

“Did you have a plan for making contact with the Steins?”

“We’ll have to establish ourselves with the neighbours before we think about shadowing the Steins’ regular activities.” Maria shifted a little and slid her arm around his back so it wasn’t squashed between them. “After that, it’s just a question of finding the best time to do some recon and gather intel so we can work out what happens next.”

“I’d have thought they’d be leaving their work at work.”

“This coming from the man who lived in the Avengers facility.”

“I couldn’t afford to live anywhere else.”

Maria gave him that. “The Steins’ son, Chase, was arrested with advanced tech on his person.”

“So not everything is being kept at work.”

“They also used to work for different companies, so if they’re working together, they’d need a common workspace.”

He made a little ‘hmm’ noise in his throat. “Would there even be space in the house?”

Maria lifted her head to see his expression. He was absolutely serious. Her mouth quirked.

“You’ve never really seen modern American suburbia, have you?”

* * *

Maria gave him the heaviest tech-filled cases to carry, of course – he was a supersoldier, after all. And Steve dealt with them as easily as if they were full of nothing more than clothing and toiletries.

The house was more or less what she’d expected given the places all along this street. Shiny American suburbia – a strange and foreign land to the daughter of a South-side Chicago cop.

She could only imagine what a Brooklyn boy who grew up in the Depression made of it.

Well, no, she didn’t have to imagine – she could see it all, right there on his face as he paused in the entryway and looked up the ‘grand staircase’ of the entryway. It was one thing to study the mapped layout of the house, quite another to see the sheer luxury of the house.

“ _How_ many people live here normally?”

“Just two.”

“Just two?”

“Hank and Sarah Bernard. Married four years, no kids yet, although they’re planning to get pregnant in the next year. Hence the house-swap, before holidays become an impossible dream.”

Steve glanced at her, his expression curious. “How do you find these things out?”

“Mostly? We make contact and ask. These days, people share personal details without thinking twice about it, so it’s not difficult to gather casual intel. Put those in the dining room, please.”

He set the suitcases down in the dining room and turned in a tight circle, surveying the space. The dining room table was large enough to fit the entire Avengers roster, past and present, without squashing, so long as Banner didn’t Hulk out and Lang didn’t size up. There’d probably even be room for Barnes if he decided to drop in.

However, the decision to make the dining room operations central was driven less by its size and more by virtue of the location of the room – right in the middle of the house, with the only windows looking out to a private courtyard. The ‘cleaning service’ - actually a service working with S.H.I.E.L.D – who’d been through had not only cleaned the place from top to toe and removed any signs of electronic tampering, but had also noted which rooms were the best for keeping any operations and intel on the lowdown.

Maria pulled out her laptop and began setting up the satellite uplink that would cover all their Ops communications while Rogers brought the rest of the gear inside.

“Isn’t it a little...odd for the first thing you do to be checking your internet connection?”

She grinned at the bewilderment of his voice. “You’ve got a lot to learn about moving house. Getting your broadband working comes before everything apart from the electricity you need to power your devices.”

“I suddenly feel old,” he said.

“I don’t need to give the standard answer for that, do I?”

Looking up, she caught his roll of the eyes before he headed back out to the car, probably to check that they hadn’t left anything inside. A few moments later, she heard him come back in.

“Hey,” he called. “Come outside and see this, Hil!”

The use of her surname-come-nickname made her frown. It felt weirdly formal – although that had been the plan, hadn’t it? Both the familiar and the formal melded together.

He’d moved out to the middle of the front lawn, staring up at the roof and shading his eyes against the sun. She paused in the doorway, “What is it?”

“You’ll have to come over here.”

Maria rolled her eyes, but crossed the lawn to stand beside him. “Do I even want to—Aaah!”

She squeaked – _squeaked_ – and clutched at his shoulders as he swept her up, the picture of a wife being scooped up by her grinning husband. “ _Roger_ —”

He strode across the lawn, probably looking like a hero off a romance novel cover. Which, Maria thought distractedly, made her the damsel in distress.

“ _Honey_ ,” she managed through gritted teeth. “ _What_ are you doing?”

Why had she never noticed the gleam of mischief in Steve’s eyes before? “Carrying you over the threshold, _sweetheart_.”

There wasn’t much Maria could do except reach up and wrap her arms around his neck. Fighting him was out of the question – both in terms of physical strength, and in terms of the way they needed to appear to anyone watching. And if they were going to put on a show, then she might as well make sure it was a convincing one.

It had nothing to do with the way her breath caught, or the hitch in her heartbeat as she bumped her nose against his throat and he looked down at her just as he stepped into the house.

“Home sweet home.”

Her lips _didn’t_ part because his mouth brushed hers. She was just...shocked. About to protest. On the verge of a sarcastic comment. The slide of his mouth over hers most certainly didn’t tingle over her flesh. And if it did, it was only because it had been a while since she’d had anyone pick her up, carry her into the house, and kiss her as he kicked the door shut behind them...

When Steve set her down in the entryway of the house, she didn’t take a second to stand because her knees were weak; he’d set her down a little off-balance, so she had to take a moment to find her feet. And her voice.

“Well.” She was pleased to hear that her voice was brisk and businesslike, without the quiver that the slide of his mouth against hers had generated in her belly. “Now that we’ve put on a show for the neighbours, I could do with a beer, please.”

He blinked before his smile settled wryly into place. “Is the honeymoon already over? Since I’m not ‘honey’ anymore?”

Maria snorted as she made herself for the dining room to confirm that the connection uplink was holding. “Don’t push it, _darling_.”

* * *

Settling in was easy enough. Once Steve brought the beers, they started setting everything up. Maria showed him how to monitor the security feeds they’d put up all over the property, and he took their personal suitcases upstairs.

The house was huge – four bedrooms and a study, an upstairs sitting area, the downstairs entertainment area (he’d turned the TV to the game between the Mets and the Cubs after checking that she didn’t mind the background noise) – another study, as well as the dining room, breakfast room, kitchen, laundry, four bathrooms...

“If there are so many bedrooms, why do we have to share a bed?”

“You can sleep on the floor if you prefer.”

“Why don’t I sleep in another room?”

Maria looked at him. “Lies are easier to keep when they’re pretty much the truth. Akela said we don’t present as people who are intimately comfortable with each other, and someone suspicious and paranoid – as the Steins are likely to be – is going to notice anything that stands out. If we’re sleeping in different rooms and we betray that fact however accidentally, it’s going to attract notice.”

He looked like he was considering sleeping in another room anyway, then shrugged and kept unpacking his gear into the husband’s side of the walk-in wardrobe that was larger than some bedrooms Maria had slept in.

As it turned out, the complication wasn’t sleeping in the same bed, it was sharing the same bathroom.

Rogers somehow managed to make any space he stepped into seem _small_.

Or maybe it was just that Maria had left the door open while brushing her teeth, and only realised it when Steve walked in to the second sink and began running a facewasher under the tap. By then it was too late to close the door, and she could hardly ask him to go somewhere else. But Maria felt at a distinct disadvantage in her sleeping set with her mouth full of toothpaste. By the time she spat and rinsed and started running her own facewasher under the tap, he was lathering his face for shaving.

Maria forced herself not to stare, even if she wanted to hold onto the sink edge and just watch him. But she couldn’t quite forbear from glancing at him in between scrubbing her face with a washer, and at least once she caught him watching her. He smiled briefly, but said nothing when she arched a brow, only shaking his head a little and continuing on with the shave.

Sharing the bed had been less fraught, she thought as she changed into a t-shirt and jeans on the wife’s side of the wardrobe.

Breakfast was simple enough – they’d shared enough breakfasts at the tower in the company of the other Avengers to know how much conversation the other was willing to make before Maria’s first coffee or Steve’s first two bowls of cereal.

It was a bit of a shock to see him come downstairs with the face mesh on – the one that simulated features that weren’t his own – but after a moment, she could almost see ‘him’ through the illusion – the way his features shifted, the expressions he made.

“What’s on today’s plan?”

“Mostly recon. We’ll walk around the neighbourhood, say hi to anyone we encounter, work out where the shops and takeaways are, and make plans to encounter the Steins.”

Steve frowned. “You’re still intent on meeting them?”

“If there’s a way to do it without seeming too awkward, yes. I prefer seeing who I’m facing.”

“Most people wouldn’t.”

“I’m not most people.” Maria had learned that early on; she would do what it took to survive, but the cost of surviving couldn’t be either indifference or crushing guilt or she wasn’t able to consider herself human. She’d killed people in cold blood and hot, defended herself and assassinated targets, and if there were nights when she woke up in a cold sweat for what she’d done, she figured only an idiot or a psychopath didn’t have regrets.

This morning, tThey checked the feeds and the warning systems the prelim team had put in place under the cover of a cleaning service.

“Everything green except one of the roof sensors,” Rogers said. “Above the porch roof. I’m going to get a line of sight from the pool deck.”

A minute later, a call came from outside, “Hey, Hill, come and see this!”

Maria frowned a little, but stepped out into the morning sunlight, absently noting the lines of sight from the neighbours’ houses to the backyard. Steve was leaning back against the wooden fence that ran around the pool deck, his eyes shaded as he looked up at the roof.

“What is it?”

He gestured her over, and she came around, frowning when she couldn’t see anything more than a couple of birds nesting, and then inhaling sharply as an arm slipped around her waist and drew her in.

 _You’re pretending to be married,_ she told herself. _Relax into him._

She put a hand on his chest to add to the appearance – and to steady herelf. “What?”

“The birds by the satellite dish,” he said disingenuously. “Explains the problem with the reception yesterday.”

“You are _not_ climbing up there to knock them off!”

The injured look was perfect before he sighed – a little too theatrically, perhaps – and turned his mouth against her hair.

“Five o’clock,” he murmured. “That’s the Steins’ house, right?”

It took Maria a second to get her mental map of the neighbourhood out. “Not quite behind us, but with four yards of common fence. Did you see something?”

“Just confirming. They have a line of sight from one of the upstairs windows to this entire pool area, thanks to that break in the trees next door.” The hand on her waist stroked up and down in a distracting mimicry of a tender caress. “We’re also giving the neighbours at nine o’clock a chance to take a good look at us.”

She knew better than to glance that way, but mentally sifted through the data on the neighbours to the left – an older couple with kids still living at home – two sons and a daughter, ranging in age from sixteen to mid-twenties. Neighbours to the right had younger kids – up to middle school – and the mother worked from home.

It was just past the height of summer, the days would be warm and the kids next door would be rowdy, and while part of the job was surveillance, another part was to gently eke out an opinion of the Steins from the other families around the place – both about them and their kids.

“We should see if nine o’clock’s teenaged daughter has an opinion on the Stein boy.”

“Would she have noticed him?”

Maria tilted her head back against his shoulder and refused to let herself think of it as leaning into the big, warm, strength of him. “She’s sixteen. She’s noticed him, even if she’s not interested.”

“Did you notice all the neighbourhood boys when you were sixteen?”

“Yes. Mostly so I could avoid them.”

“Heartbreaker?”

The grin was teasing and Maria felt a stab of irritation. As though the boys at school would ever have given her a second look any more than most men did!

“Target,” she said bluntly.

His smile dropped, and she had a moment to regret her honesty as a swift furrow creased his brow. “They bullied you?”

“A little.” Pulling away, Maria began to start back around the pool, only to have her shoulder caught as she turned.

“I’m sorry.”

“Why? It wasn’t you doing the taunting.” She could have done with a friend like Steve Rogers, actually, even the guy he’d been before the serum. With just one person on her side, she could have conquered the school. But the outcasts of her childhood had been too busy trying to keep their own skins intact to be able to spare any compassion for her, let alone courage. In the end Maria had learned to fight her own battles, because nobody else would. “It was a long time ago, St—Rogers.”

He looked at her through wary, lowered lashes. “Then I’m sorry for bringing it up.”

Maria’s stomach lurched as she looked up into his eyes, and her first instinct was to wave it off, careless and dismissive. But that wouldn’t help the sense of intimacy that they were trying to build here, however false it might be. So she simply said, “Thanks.”

This time, when she turned to go, he didn’t pull her back. But she was halfway around the pool when he called, “Hill?”

“Roger?”

“ _I’d_ have broken my heart over you back in the day,” he said with a slight smile.

The flush washed her nape and earlobes. “Well,” she managed. “I should hope so, seeing as you married me."

**Author's Note:**

> This idea was prompted by [this tumblr post](http://tielan.tumblr.com/post/126435201528/digivolvin-u-know-ive-expressed-my-love-for). Obviously, it got long and epic, and I never managed to get this far, and given the way my brain is currently working (or not), it's never going to be completed.
> 
> The story was going to follow the usual pattern of "they fall in love while living together" and then the mission ends, and they'd angst a little (well, Steve would angst a lot), because Maria thinks she's not the kind of woman whom a man like Steve comes home to, and Steve thinks he's not the kind of man who could give Maria a respite from the work of world security. They sort it out. :)


End file.
